Commercial Description

Buffalo LinkStation Live is a Network Attached Storage built in DLNA Server, desined for home networking to share your documents, pictures, movie and music over a network.

You can store contents from network computers or using the one touch direct copy function, that is a means of taking pictures or movies from your digital camera, camcorder and storage device via USB port directly. Stored data can be shared on your network and a built-in DLNA media server can stream it to a PC, a MAC, a Buffalo LinkTheater an other DLNA CERTIFIED™ entertainment devices. Our Web Access feature enables you to access your data and media stored in the LinkStation via the interenet by computuers and iPhone's. With a built-in BitTorrent Client, LinkStation can download content without the requirement to keep your PC powered up.

Intelligent Power Saving functions, timer power on/off and auto power on/off with your Windows PC all help towards power saving and eco in mind.

Features

With Web Access you can store, share and access files from any web browser

Use Web Access for iPhone to access the digital library on your LinkStation

Hacker's information

Following section documents some additional technical detail on LS-CHL(v2).

Hacking LS-CHL is dangerous and may potentially brick your device, void your warranty, damage your data. Do it at your own risk.

U-Boot

Das U-boot is the bootloader used in LS-CHL device, as well as all other recent Buffalo products. U-boot is stored on the device flash ROM. It is the ONLY thing in flash. A file copy of U-boot is also present on the hard disk's first partition (/dev/sda1) in a file named u-boot.buffalo.

This page, although focused on older Linkstations, documents some U-Boot features that are specific to Buffalo products. Note that LS-CHL's stock U-Boot does not include the network monitor, so it is not possible to control the boot sequence as described there.

Apart from normal system boot, the stock U-boot implements a system emergency recovery that is activated when a bootable system is not found on the hard disk.

Linux Kernel

Stock U-Boot loads the Linux kernel from a file named uImage.buffalo on the hard disk first partition (/dev/sda1).

The initrd (initial ramdisk)

Buffalo's stock U-Boot tries to load the initrd from a file named initrd.buffalo on the hard disk's first partition (/dev/sda1). The stock initrd implements Buffalo-specific system sanity checks, system recovery procedures and firmware update tasks.

The initrd is not an absolute system requirement. Providing an empty initrd.buffalo cause the system to boot straight with /dev/sda2 as the root filesystem. This is the key to start a different GNU/Linux system from the stock one. Note that "empty initrd" does not mean an empty file: rather, it means an initrd which contains and empty filesystem. [1] shows how to create one.

How to get Telnet access?

If the firmware version is older than 1.34, the process is different with LS-XHL. You need to use the acp_commander to copy the "telnetd" to /usr/local/sbin from older firmware, such as 1.10 and then follow the XHL guide.

Setting up a scanner server

This page walks you through the setting up of the SANE daemon saned on your linkstation. This allows you to plugin a scanner to your linkstation via the USB port and make that scanner available over the network.